Contact centers often employ a number of agents for handling inbound and outbound calls. The nature and purpose of the calls may vary greatly over a short time. For example, outbound calling campaigns may involve originating calls to collect debts, solicit donations for a non-profit organization, or offer new products for sale. Agents assigned to these campaigns must be trained with the appropriate debt collection practices, familiar with the non-profit organization for which donations are sought, or knowledgeable about the products being offered for sale. These same agents may also be involved in handling inbound calls, and may be trained to answer questions associated with various products, customers seeking service, etc.
It is evident that these agents must be trained in a variety of areas including how to operate the call center computer workstations, interact with other customer information systems for updating customer records, research product features, or being familiar with guidelines and policies associated with a telemarketing campaign. Additionally, it is not uncommon for employee turnover in call centers to be relatively high, requiring continual training of new agents. Agent training is important since training increases their effectiveness. Failure to train an agent can result in poor customer service, loss of revenue, and other adverse impacts. Thus, an efficient and effective infrastructure for training contact center agents is necessary.
Training systems may provide computer-based learning that allows each agent to receive training in a manner that suits the agent's schedule. Some training systems are designed to be locally executed on the agent's workstation computer while other training systems can be hosted on a server and can provide training content streamed to the agent via network interconnection.
The growing popularity of tablet computers, which is one form of a growing category of mobile processing devices, allows agents to obtain training whenever it is convenient to their schedule. This may require that the training content be downloaded into their mobile device well in advance of when the training session actually begins. In other applications, an agent may desire to interact with training content using their home computer during their off-hours. In either instance, the agent may interact with the training content after it is loaded into their computer.
However, such training systems are not integrated into the contact center infrastructure and may cause additional administrative burdens to coordinate training between the agent, call handling systems, and the training infrastructure. Further, such training systems are not configured to accommodate mobile devices to their maximum potential or download training content to other processing devices. Thus, contact centers have a need for an integrated, efficient, and flexible architecture for managing training content that involves inter alia, mobile devices. It is with regard to this and other aspects that the present disclosure is presented.